The Five Keys to Fitness

It's not as complex as some make it, but it's also not as easy as a magic Instagram program hawked by that influencer with perfect abs

Fitness isn’t just hitting the gym. It’s not just about your diet either. It’s also not just about running 5 miles every morning, or cold showers or meditating.

There are five keys to fitness. They aren’t hard to understand, and together they comprise a near-foolproof plan to optimize your health and chances for optimal gains as you begin - or continue - your fitness journey.

(Side note: my god do I hate the word journey. It’s overplayed and dramatic. But I digress.)

Discipline

Motivation is a terrible thing to rely on. It’s weak. It comes and goes, and is subject to the whims of your mood and circumstance. Instead, cultivate discipline. Discipline is what compels you to do something when time is tight and you don’t feel like doing it. The best marketing slogan of the past 20 years is Nike’s “Just Do It”, because honestly, it’s really that simple.

I explain it like being on a rollercoaster. Rollercoasters are on rails, their direction, path and duration are predetermined. Once you are on the ride, you will finish the ride. It’s that simple.

On days I don’t feel like training, I just go into rollercoaster mode. I change my clothes, put on my shoes, fire up the Bluetooth speaker, crank some Disturbed (Immortalized is my go-to album, in case you are wondering) or a podcast, and just start. I’m on rails. I don’t let my brain get in the way. If I start my workout, I will finish it, 100% of the time.

Discipline is what keeps you accountable over time. Discipline is the bottom of the pyramid and props up the other four keys.

Without discipline, you will fall back on motivation, and as mentioned above, motivation is a cheap muse. Some days it’s there, some days it’s not. It’s unreliable, like the weather. Don’t count on it.

As ex-Navy SEAL Jocko Willink says, discipline equals freedom. Once you do the things you know you need to do, not only do you have the thing done, but it’s not looming over your head all day like a cloud of guilt. You have the freedom to go about your day and tackle other things unencumbered. You did the hard thing. That builds momentum: once you have one thing done, you are far more likely to continue building on that small victory, so that at the end of the day, you have made dozens of small choices whose consequences get you closer to whatever your goal is.

Resistance Training

We’re all afflicted with sarcopenia, which means after roughly 30 years of age, we all start to lose muscle mass, roughly 1% per year, unless something mitigates it. A key to successful aging is carrying as much muscle mass into middle age as we possibly can, especially to offset risks like heart disease and stroke, two major causes of middle- and advanced-age mortality.

Resistance/strength training is the mitigator.

Whether you choose weights or simple bodyweight exercises, strength training isn’t just for meatheads. It’s for anyone who wants to build or maintain muscle while moving loads in greater ranges of motion than you’d otherwise experience. It’s for aesthetics (aka looking good naked), clothes fitting better, appearing more youthful. It’s for being more useful and functional, which translates into better time with your kids, enjoying more activities without the risk of injury, being able to simply do more.

If you had to pick one type of exercise to do for the rest of your life, it’d be resistance training. Absent some other specific goal (running a marathon, etc.), it provides by far the greatest ROI of any physical thing you can do.

Nutrition

80% of your results, especially when it comes to fat loss, comes from what you do in the kitchen, not the gym. If your diet sucks, it doesn’t matter what training program you follow, because as the adage goes, you can’t out-train a bad diet. If you’re looking for weight loss, you won’t get it. If you’re seeking muscle mass gains, you won’t get it.

Remember that exercise is a stimulus, and your progress comes from what you do afterward, which is the response. If you pound your body in the gym day after day, but don’t give your body the nutrition it needs to recover, you’re treading water.

I’m not going to go deep on what kind of diet is “best” - because there is no best diet. There is, however, a best diet for you given your goals, restraints, tolerances and lifestyle.

Regardless of what diet you want to follow, your fitness will go nowhere without proper discipline in the kitchen.

Recovery/Rest

This is a problem for most people. We are overstimulated, under-slept, and over-stressed. Most people blitz through their days with their bodies and minds in race mode, fully reactive, and give themselves very little downtime. We live in a culture where busyness is considered a virtue, and any self-care as it relates to rest and recover is considered weak.

How many times have you been part of this exchange?

“Hey man, how have you been?”

“Busy man, busy. It’s been crazy, just go go go. How about you?”

“Yeah man, I hear you. I don’t stop ‘till I go to bed at midnight. Busy as hell right now. Good problem to have right?”

If you are trying to optimize fitness, regardless of your goal, and you don’t allow for proper sleep and stress management, you’re running yourself hard without allowing any refueling time. This will lead to burn-out eventually, and it happens quicker the older you are.

During the summers, I drop my training plan down to 3 weight sessions/week, and 1 mobility session. This allows time for weekend golf without me feeling sore and tight on the course.

During the winters, I crank up my gym sessions to 4-5/week, and mobility 1-2/week. The workouts are shorter on this plan given the higher frequency, but guess what?

I almost make better gains on a 3x/week plan rather than a 4x-5x. Why? I’m allowing myself more recovery time between training sessions.

Put the phone down. Go to bed earlier. Take magnesium before bed to help you get to deeper sleep faster.

If it’s the weekend and you’ve got a few free mins, take a 20-30 min afternoon nap.

Recharge or pay the price over the long term.

Cardio

I usually take some shit for putting this last on the list, but it’s still a fundamental key to fitness.

I am not a fan of doing excessive cardio unless you have a goal that is dependent on cardiovascular fitness, like a marathon, mountain bike race, or something similar. In that case, cardio training will be the focus of your training almost exclusively. But for most people, I suggest increasing weight training and reducing cardio a bit, when all other parameters are equal.

Cardio for fat loss is notoriously overrated, because the calorie expenditure for most general cardio sessions is way below what you’d think it is.

Instead, I good functional baseline for every human is to be able to run one mile at a reasonable clip. You should be able to walk some trails on gentle hills for several without feeling spent. Taking a 5 mile bike ride at 9-10 MPH should be a breeze.

I prefer to make cardio something fun instead of grinding on a treadmill every morning for 30 minutes. Get outside, go for a walk or ruck, take a bike ride, play a recreational sport. Nothing crazy, just do it consistently.

Cardio is good - for cardiovascular health. Far too many people, especially when they get older, tend to focus on cardio alone for their overall fitness, which leaves them beat up with declining muscle mass. Don’t be that person.

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There you go. Five things, and really, all that you need. If you’re sold anything else beyond these, you’re being, well, sold.

This is all 90% of the general population will ever need, not accounting for specialized conditions and medical considerations.

It’s not sexy (or lucrative) to make something simple when you can make it complex and charge money to explain the manufactured complexity. A lot of the fitness industry is just these ideas repackaged and marketed by perfect 20-somethings on Instagram with words like “secret” and “hack” peppered in.

You only need these five bases covered. These will get you further than you ever thought possible.

Or keep you on the road if you’re already doing them.